New technologies aim to help personalize instruction

Here are several new ed-tech products that can help educators personalize learning for their students

As more school leaders recognize technology’s potential to help personalize instruction, ed-tech providers are developing products that can quickly zero in on a student’s unique learning needs and deliver lessons to address these needs. Here are several new products with this goal in mind.

New Compass Learning products: Pathblazer, Hybridge, Gradbound

Compass Learning has completely revamped its product line to focus on what its customers say are their biggest pain points: blended learning, intervention and credit recovery, and personalized learning.

The company has announced three new products to address these needs: Pathblazer, a reading and math intervention program that helps quickly identify struggling learners in grades 3-8 and puts them on a path to success with a personal “acceleration plan”; Hybridge, a blended learning product that offers individual pacing for elementary and middle school students; and Gradbound, a credit recovery system for high school students.

Pathblazer and Hybridge are available now; Gradbound will be released in spring 2015.

LearnBop/Fuel Education

Online and blended learning provider Fuel Education has partnered with LearnBop, which offers an automated math tutoring and assessment product for students in grades 5-9, to give schools more options for personalizing math instruction during the critical years for building a solid math foundation.

Using adaptive technology, LearnBop simulates a one-to-one tutoring experience by guiding students through problems step-by-step so they can learn fundamental math concepts at their own pace. As students complete problems, teachers can use dashboards to analyze learning behavior by concept and by student. Teachers are able to address common learning gaps with the class, group students by need, or create personalized playlists to help individual students progress.

Launched just a year ago, LearnBop is part of math instruction in 350 schools in 17 states, where students reportedly are seeing remarkable gains. After one year, 96 percent of students who used LearnBop on a weekly basis at School No. 385 in Brooklyn passed the state math exam—up from just 25 percent who passed the prior year.

This fall, Fuel Education will offer LearnBop to customers through its personalized learning platform, PEAK, an open technology platform that provides a single, unified view of online and blended learning activities across multiple solutions and providers.